Book Review: Jane Jacobs' Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics

Not one of the recent books in my ethics library cites Jane Jacobs’ 1993 work, Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics. The citations I found on-line do not include any about government ethics. This is a big loss for the government ethics community, because Jacobs, who died a couple of years ago, gave us a lot to think about. And we’ve been missing out.

Jacobs’ book (in the form of a dialogue among a group of people) sets out two separate and opposed, yet symbiotic moral syndromes. By syndromes, she means lists of values or virtues, that is, attitudes that are valued within each of two basic groups, but not in the other.

These moral syndromes apply only to occupational groups, ways of making a living: commerce and government. These happen to be exactly the same occupational groups that government ethics deals with, and that government ethics tries its best to keep separate. She calls them the commercial and guardian syndromes.

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Here are the two lists that constitute the syndromes:

Commmercial Syndrome
Shun force
Come to voluntary agreements
Be honest
Collaborate easily with strangers and aliens
Compete
Respect contracts
Use initiative and enterprise
Be open to inventiveness and novelty
Be efficient
Promote comfort and convenience
Dissent for the sake of the task
Invest for Productive Purposes
Be industrious
Be thrifty
Be optimistic

Guardian Syndrome
Shun trading
Exert prowess
Be obedient and disciplined
Adhere to tradition
Respect hierarchy
Be loyal
Take vengeance
Deceive for the sake of the task
Make rich use of leisure
Be ostentatious
Dispense largesse
Be exclusive
Show fortitude
Be fatalistic
Treasure honor

You have to read the book to fully understand each of the values she lists. It is also important to recognize that these are not all what we commonly consider virtues, but rather attitudes that are valued. And the lists are not simply pairs of opposing attitudes. It’s more complex than that. Even two clearly opposing attitudes, such as “Be honest” and “Deceive for the sake of the task,” are complimented by “Dissent for the sake of the task.”

It’s also important to recognize that there are many other values that are shared by the two syndromes, such as cooperation, which Jacobs considers the most important universal virtue.

The guardian attitudes come out of a different sort of society than we live in, a hierarchical society featuring castes and a chivalric approach to attitudes. Hence, “Treasure honor,” “Dispense largesse,” “Exert prowess” (by which Jacobs means especially force), and “Be loyal” (these happen to be the four principal chivalric virtues). But Jacobs takes the origin of these and other attitudes back to hunter-gatherer societies, as well as early agricultural societies.

Don’t pooh-pooh the guardian attitudes. Dispensing largesse to the poor is an important part of governing still, thank goodness, even for (especially for?) the most corrupt municipal officials.

One interesting observation Jacobs makes concerns the ancient Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, which forbade government officials from trading in property that went with their position, or to shift ownership in it to other members of his family (although trading in other property was acceptable). “The really severe penalty, execution, was decreed for a governor or magistrate who took property belonging to a lower officer for himself or made money from hiring out his lower officers to anybody.”

Each set of attitudes is appropriate to particular parts of society, although each, when taken too far, can be a vice. This can easily be seen with “Be loyal.” The guardian syndrome does not only apply to government. It also applies, for example, to religions (science follows the commercial syndrome, which is why, Jacobs points out, the values of science and religion are so opposed).

What makes Jacobs’ book especially valuable to government ethics is her observation that far worse than taking particular attitudes too far is mixing parts of the two syndromes together into a “monstrous hybrid.” Her examples of this include Soviet-style Communism (guardians running commerce), organized crime (its strong guardian values are vices, because their goal is not serving the public, but serving themselves), and the mergers and acquisition culture of Wall Street (taking over businesses to dispose of competition and for the sake of self-aggrandizement).

She notes that “if other guardian precepts ... break down, then loyalty converts from virtue into vice.” This is one important example of her Law of Intractable Systemic Corruption: “Any significant breach of a syndrome’s integrity – usually by adopting an inappropriate function – causes some normal virtues to convert automatically to vices, and still others to bend and break for necessary expedience.”

Such breaches can become institutionalized, thereby blurring and blunting morality, so that random transgressions become entrenched, and can easily spread. This happened with bribery in the defense industry, for example.

For government ethics purposes, “Shun trading” is the most important guardian attitude to preserve. Once that attitude becomes blurred, conflicts of interest become rampant. Loyalty becomes something that has nothing to do with bureaucratic hierarchy, but loyalty among thieves. Deception becomes something not having to do with the task of defending a society (and there are fewer cases where it is a virtue than in earlier times), but with covering up wrongdoing. Just one invasive value can undermine all the rest.

The other especially valuable idea in Systems of Survival is Jacobs’ observation that there are two ways of keeping the syndromes apart. One is to develop a caste system, where commerce and government are divided among different castes (historically with the commercial castes socially lower than the governing castes). The other way to keep the syndromes apart – ours – she calls “moral flexibility,” that is, the ability of individuals to move back and forth between the two syndromes.

The problem with castes (beyond the clear injustices) is that they usually lead to resentment and revolution. The problem with moral flexibility is that it is very difficult to do. It requires a great deal of knowledge and use of our critical capacities. It makes great demands on individuals’ moral understanding. This is why ethics education, ongoing ethics discussion (“wholesome cooperation”), and ethical leadership are so important. Otherwise, our natural cooperation can allow our values to be undermined by a corrupt environment.

A culture that requires moral flexibility is what North American government ethics practitioners are faced with. It’s not just about doing right, it’s about doing right within the appropriate moral syndrome, that is, knowing when it’s appropriate to use one or the other approach, and knowing how to do it properly. This requires a great deal of imitation and practice or, where there are not good models to imitate, laws.

For example, so many people these days say how important it is to run a government like a business, even to have businesspeople run governments. But businesses are all about profit and competition, two things that have no role in government (except the competitive bidding of contracts, but even here there are other considerations, such as union representation).

Similarly, efficiency seems like something you want the government to practice, but it can lead to some horrible results. Jacobs describes an attempt to get a transit police force to arrest more people by giving them incentives. The result was arresting innocent people.

It will come as no surprise that the profession most often required to be morally flexible is the legal profession, the profession asked to deal with their own day-to-day ethical problems, and also to give advice on government ethics matters.

Not only do lawyers in a guardian role sometimes tempted to take benefits for themselves or their clients, but lawyers in private practice often use inappropriate deception in commercial arrangements. More than any profession, lawyers are caught between the syndromes and have the most frequent opportunities to undermine the guardian syndrome. The result is that in almost every case of conflict of interest, there is at least one lawyer involved.

Jacobs’ vision of two syndromes helps us to understand this, and might help lawyers be more ethically aware. It certainly does not answer all government ethics questions, but it does provide a valuable way of analyzing what happens when things go wrong ethically in government organizations. I highly recommend that government ethics professionals read the book (and I have no interest in the publisher).